What the Rise of Southern Football Says About America

The South is dominating college football like never before, but its ascent isn't just a matter of good coaching. How a population boom and a growing economy have helped turn a regional obsession into a national juggernaut.

By

Darren Everson

Updated Dec. 5, 2008 11:59 p.m. ET

College football has been conquered, in nearly every respect, by the Deep South.

The Southeastern Conference, a 76-year-old coalition of 12 universities in nine Southern states stretching from Louisiana to Florida, has won three national college football titles in five years, including the last two by blowout, and has an unrivaled 11-4 record in the Bowl Championship Series since 1999.

Its teams lead the nation in average attendance, have five of the 12 highest-paid coaches in college football and just signed two broadcast deals worth as much as $3 billion over the next 15 years. Tomorrow, Alabama and Florida, ranked No. 1 and No. 2 by the Associated Press, play for the conference title -- with the winner likely heading to the national title game.

The engine of this success is college football's unshakable primacy in Southern culture -- plus the recent shifts in population and wealth, the protection of politicians and some prescient financial moves by the conference that have reinforced it.

In recent years, the South has undergone rapid growth. Twenty-seven of the 50 fastest-growing metropolitan regions in the country in 2007 were in the South, while personal-income growth in the region outpaced the national average over the past decade. These changes have added muscle to the South's historic passion for college football. While they rank low in many measures like per-capita income and educational achievement, states like Alabama and Mississippi rank close to the top in the percentage of high-school students who play football. And among states that have more than 10 native sons playing in the National Football League, the top six producers by percentage of population are Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida and Georgia.

ENLARGE

ROLL TIDE: Alabama's Marquis Maze scores against rival Auburn last week. The Crimson Tide plays Florida tomorrow for a shot at the national title game.
Getty Images

Meanwhile, traditional Northern football states like Pennsylvania, which has long sent young men to heralded northern programs like Penn State, Notre Dame and Ohio State and has stocked the NFL for decades, are falling behind. Today there are 45% more native Louisianans (64) than Pennsylvanians (44) in the NFL, even though Louisiana has only one-third of Pennsylvania's population.

Historians say the sport first became a regional obsession in the South when Alabama upset Washington in the 1926 Rose Bowl. At that time, football was an elite sport dominated by Northern schools like Harvard and Notre Dame. The South was a deeply depressed region with half the per-capita income of the rest of the country and very few unifying elements. There were no Major League Baseball teams in the South and modern passions like auto racing were in their infancy. Andrew Doyle, an associate professor of history at Winthrop University, says the ability to compete in college football made Southerners "feel like they were part of the American mainstream."

The sport's profile grew in the '60s and '70s when Alabama coach Paul "Bear" Bryant won six national titles even as the South was being pilloried for its resistance to the Civil Rights movement. Wayne Flynt, a professor emeritus of history at Auburn, says Mr. Bryant's achievements were a point of pride even for Southerners from other states.

The desire to win was so strong it even outweighed racial prejudice -- Mr. Bryant was finally able to freely recruit black players after his team suffered a beating in 1970 at the hands of Southern California, whose star running back, Sam Cunningham, was black. "Nothing did more for racial integration in the South than sport and the military," Mr. Flynt says. Today, expectations are so high that despite the performances of Alabama and Florida, many consider this a down season for the conference because LSU and Georgia lost eight games combined.

The breadth of the South's football culture creates a fanaticism that crosses all lines. People who didn't attend the schools, or go to college at all, still support them, and will even make donations. It's a group that insiders call "dirt-road alumni." After his business was damaged in Hurricane Katrina, Joe Yargo, a trucker from Hammond, La., who did not attend LSU, says he told his wife "I might lose my house, but I won't lose my season tickets."

"Half the people in that stadium can't spell LSU," says political consultant James Carville, an LSU alumnus. "It doesn't matter. They identify with it. It's culturally such a big deal."

College football also encourages a pride of place; something other popular sports in the south, like Nascar, don't. Karyn Rybacki, a professor at Northern Michigan University, says that's a big deal in the South, where "people will describe themselves as being from Alabama or Georgia even if they've worked in San Francisco for the last 20 years."

This loyalty extends to the political establishment. Within the nine SEC states, two-thirds of the governors and U.S. senators are SEC alumni. In the eight Midwestern states that make up the Big Ten, just over a third of governors and senators went to one of their states' major football schools.

ENLARGE

Former Louisiana Gov. and U.S. Sen. Huey Long, an early football booster
MPI/Getty Images

In the 1920s and '30s, Louisiana governor and U.S. Senator Huey Long, who'd won a scholarship to LSU but couldn't afford to attend, set the tone by leading the LSU marching band. The region's politicians have immersed themselves in football ever since, even using their influence on occasion to help them win. When Alabama agreed to pay coach Nick Saban $32 million over eight years in 2007 -- one of the largest college contracts of all time -- Gov. Bob Riley, an Alabama graduate, publicly defended the decision.

In the early 2000s, former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, who attended South Carolina, tried to help the team by meeting high school players it was recruiting. When editors at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution gave a story about a 2006 Georgia Bulldogs loss the headline "Dogs Get Put in Their Place," Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, a former Georgia player, sent the paper a letter denouncing the tone of the headline and the paper's "poison pens."

The games themselves have become arenas for politicians to hand out cards, shake hands with donors and even advertise. Former Louisiana Sen. John Breaux recalls sitting at an LSU game in the 1980s and seeing a plane pass overhead carrying a banner for a campaign opponent of his, Henson Moore. "I wanted to shoot it down," he says.

Politicians have been such fixtures at the games that their practice of accepting complimentary tickets has begun to come under criticism. Before this season, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal decided to stop accepting the 10 free tickets his office was allotted.

Central to the success of the SEC is the ability of its schools to convert this passion into money -- even in a region where there isn't so much to go around. Only three SEC member schools have endowments larger than $1 billion as of the 2007 fiscal year, while half or more of the schools in other major conferences like the Big Ten, Big 12, Pacific-10 and Atlantic Coast Conference do. Their average undergraduate enrollment of roughly 18,000 is significantly smaller than the averages for the Big 12 and Pac-10 conferences. The median household income in Ohio, the poorest state represented by the Big Ten, was $4,500 higher than the average median income for all the SEC states last year.

Nonetheless, in 2006, four SEC schools -- Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and LSU -- raised $35 million or more in athletic donations, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education survey. That figure beats every school in the Big 12, Big East and Pac-10 that responded to the survey. (Nine of the 73 major-conference schools, including Southern California, didn't respond.)

The conference has also made some shrewd financial moves. In 1992, the SEC was the first major conference to take advantage of an overlooked NCAA rule that allows conferences to stage a championship game; where the ticket sales and TV rights fees generate large sums for the conference to divvy up. In 1994, the SEC announced an exclusive TV deal with CBS that led to nationally televised games. The deal was recently renewed for $55 million a year over the next 15 years.

The historical knock on SEC schools among rivals is that their success is predicated on a willingness to stockpile great players by violating NCAA rules on recruiting and athlete benefits. While some of the sanctions have been minor, every SEC school but Vanderbilt has been on probation in the last 25 years.

Another charge is that lower academic standards give SEC teams an advantage in recruiting. Just three SEC schools -- Vanderbilt, Florida and Georgia -- were cited among the top 80 universities in U.S. News & World Report's 2009 college rankings, while all 11 members of the Big Ten were in the top 80. Last year, in a statement on that conference's Web site, Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany wrote: "I love speed and the SEC has great speed ... but there are appropriate balances when mixing academics and athletics." Mr. Delany declined to comment for this story.

SEC commissioner Mike Slive says the SEC has made a point of cleaning up the practices that have led to NCAA sanctions, and that the academic performance of its athletes has improved and all SEC schools are in compliance with the NCAA's new academic guidelines for athletes. Because the SEC's schools are located in a economically challenged region, Mr. Slive says, they serve a different mission -- to provide opportunity. "There are differences in elementary and secondary-school systems in this part of the country," he says.

While Mr. Slive says he doesn't resent comparisons to other conferences, the SEC should come out ahead in many of them. "The reality is that this league has taken care of its business."

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.